Bird Boy

This modern fairytale was started in Vietnam, where I lived for almost 6 years, and completed in Germany, where I live now. I am an animal lover so, as in Cyprus, I was not impressed with the way animals are treated in Vietnam. Even though there are increasingly more and more animal lovers, as in Japan, there is still wholesale abuse of animals, largely due to the influence of over a 1000 years of Chinese rule.
A modern fairytale, like traditional fairytales, has magic and an ethical lesson to teach. In this book the magic is love, the miracle of birds and justice. The story is very direct (I am honest to a fault), and deals with the culturally acceptable widely practiced imprisonment of birds in bamboo cages. It is set in Saigon, a noisy, ugly, polluted and overcrowded city, where I survived for over two years with my beautiful Vietnamese wife.
The hero of the tale is Bao, an 8-year-old boy who lives with his homeless mother, selling fruit and vegetables on the street pavements with numerous other hardy locals. He often climbs trees to reach the fruit, and thus becomes acquainted with beautiful and exotic birds. At first chats with them playfully and then, as he learns and sees more of them, he totally falls in love with this magnificent universe of flying and singing wonders. After this, he begins noticing the shops that sell exotic birds imprisoned in cages - shops that exist all over the city. How can this be? he asks himself.
The boy is deeply moved by this human cruelty, and makes it his mission to free the birds from their cages. And thus the magic begins…